American Masters: Buddy Guy (WNET, PBS, RCA Records, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s first music show on PBS was a long-overdue American Masters tribute to blues singer and guitarist Buddy Guy, who’s long existed in a sort of netherworld: he’s sold enough records to lift himself out of poverty, he’s been acclaimed as a model by other blues guitarists (including white ones like Eric Clapton and John Mayer) and he’s won about nine Grammy Awards and mentions in various Halls of Fame. But he’s never quite managed to become the sort of icon of blues Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and B. B. King did, and judging from this show I’d say the main reason is his quiet, humble personality. George “Buddy” Guy was born July 30, 1936 in Lettsworth, Louisiana to a family of sharecroppers. As a boy he picked cotton for $2.50 per 100 pounds and learned to play guitar on a homemade two-stringed instrument called a “diddley bow” (the origin of fellow R&B legend Bo Diddley’s name) before he got his first actual guitar, a Harmony acoustic that decades later he donated to the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. One of the big influences on Guy’s career was a little-known player named Guitar Slim who had one hit record, “The Things I Used to Do,” in 1953 on the Specialty label (the piano player was a star in his own right, the young Ray Charles). Guitar Slim (true name: Eddie Jones) was known for a flamboyant stage act and for being so small the musicians in his band would literally carry him onto the stage; and the Vanguard Visionaries compilation on Buddy Guy features a scorching live cover of “The Things I Used to Do” as well as a song called “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” which Guy wrote based on the old Mother Goose rhyme that Stevie Ray Vaughan later covered.

When Guy got his first professional gig with a bandleader in Baton Rouge named Big Poppa Tilley (Guy had had to move to Baton Rouge to go to high school because there were no Black high schools in the Lettsworth area – yet another example of how Jim Crow segregation was separate and incredibly unequal), he insisted on facing away from the audience when he played – and Tilley fired him the first night. Eventually Guy moved to Chicago on September 25, 1957, and according to his own account (one of the best things the makers of this program did was have virtually all of it narrated by Guy himself, sometimes from archival interviews but mostly in footage made especially for the show) he really wasn’t interested in pursuing a career as a musician himself. He was hoping to get a day job that would keep him alive while he haunted the blues clubs at night to hear the blues legends that had already come up from the South to Chicago: Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in particular. Guy got jobs as a backing musician and made his first record for the tiny Cobra label, which also launched the career of Otis Rush (another fabulously talented blues musician who never quite cracked the pantheon even though his early record “I Can’t Quit You, Baby” was covered by Led Zeppelin). The show didn’t mention, though Guy’s Wikipedia page does, that his second session for Cobra was produced by, and featured the piano playing of, Ike Turner – yet more evidence that, as much of an asshole as he became, he was one hell of a talent scout: among the people Ike Turner helped launch were B. B. King, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James and, of course, Tina Turner.

He signed with Chess Records in 1964 but, like Rush, he found that Leonard and Phil Chess, the company’s (white, Jewish) owners were no longer interested in breaking new, unique talent the way they’d been when they signed Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry. Guy got pressed into service as a session musician for Muddy and Wolf and, when he got a chance to make his own sides, they tried to cast him as their answer to B. B. King (one of the few major blues musicians of the 1950’s who escaped the Chess orbit: he signed with the L.A.-based Modern Records company in 1951, stayed there a decade, then moved to ABC-Paramount and stayed there as it merged into MCA, then Universal Music, until the end), recording him as a soul singer with horn sections and occasional guitar breaks. (One of his Chess single releases was “That’s My Speed,” a pretty obvious knock-off of Barrett Strong’s Motown hit “Money [That’s What I Want].”) Live, Buddy Guy developed a thrilling act that included using an unusually long cord to connect his electric guitar to his amplifier, so he could walk through the entire bar and sometimes even walk out the door of the bar and play on the street – with the predictable result that when he went back in, new customers would follow to hear more of those amazing sounds. But Leonard Chess didn’t think Guy’s guitar style was saleable on records – he notoriously dismissed it as “just a bunch of noise” – and so Guy didn’t get a chance to shine on records until he quit Chess when his contract ran out in 1968.

He was signed by, of all companies, Vanguard Records, which had started as a classical label, then branched out into folk music – they got the contract to record the Newport Folk Festivals and there discovered their biggest artist, Joan Baez – and in the late 1960’s they moved even further into blues and rock. Their big rock act was the San Francisco Bay Area band Country Joe and the Fish, and they established themselves as a blues label with a three-LP series called Chicago! The Blues! Today! Buddy Guy appeared on those albums and also got to record whole LP’s for Vanguard, but even before that he’d teamed up with harmonica player Junior Wells for live gigs and sessions for Delmark Records, which he made under a pseudonym because he was still under contract to Chess. Guy’s biggest success on records came when he was already in his 60’s, when he signed to the Silvertone Records company – which started out as a roots-rock subsidiary of Jive Records and ended up as an imprint of the giant Sony-BMG combine, which has put out Guy’s most recent records on what remains of the RCA label – and started winning Grammy Awards in both the traditional and contemporary blues categories. Guy has some odd stories to tell here, including the phone call he got in 1987 from Muddy Waters, who said he’d been ill but was getting better and he wanted to make sure Guy kept working to keep the blues alive. Two days later Guy got a call from a reporter who asked him to comment on the death of Muddy Waters, and Guy said, “What do you mean, Muddy passed? I just talked to him on the phone two days ago!”

There were also brief clips of other guitarists, including Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana and John Mayer, explaining just what made Guy’s style so unique; he pushed the finger-bending that enables the player to change the pitch of a note while the string is still vibrating further than anyone else (Mayer explained that the technique began with Aaron “T-Bone” Walker – who’d probably learned it from his teacher, the short-lived jazz great Charlie Christian – only B. B. King had pushed it farther and Buddy Guy pushed it farther still. Ironically, on his own American Masters program King had explained that he started string-bending only because he could never master the slide guitar, so he came as close as he could to the sound of a slide without using one.) Buddy Guy is a classic example of a musician who never became an enormous star (not even, in his own field, to the extent B. B. King did) but had a substantial and influential career through sheer hard work and perseverance, and he made it to the White House to perform for the Obamas (Barack Obama even sang a chorus with Guy’s band and he had a reasonably credible voice, though not good enough for him to consider giving up his day job) as well as getting mentioned by a lot of other guitarists (mostly white and, in Carlos Santana’s case, Latino) as an influence even though they’ve made a lot more money than he has.